EVOLUTION AND MUSICAL ORIGINS: A REVIEW ESSAY Singing Neanderthals: Origins Music, Language, Mind and Body. By Steven Mithen. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005. [ix, 374 p. ISBN 0-297-64317-7. £20.00.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. Nature's Music: Science Birdsong. Edited by Peter Marier and Hans Slabbekoorn. Amsterdam: Elsevier Academic, 2004. [xviii, 513 p. ISBN 0-12-473070-1. $75.00.] Plates, illustrations, bibliography, index, 2 compact discs. Singing Life Birds: Art and Science Listening to Birdsong. By Donald Kroodsma. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. [xii, 482 p. ISBN 0618-40568-2. $28.00.] Plates, illustrations, index, compact disc. A brief but haunting passage in Karel Capek's Utopian satire Valka s mloky (War with the Newts, 1936)-in which the industrialized world, through a series economically viable steps, colludes in the devastation its own environment-conjures the image giant salamanders emerging from the waters a South Sea lagoon and commencing to sway together in the moonlight. Observers record impressions that the behavior seems ritualistic; others claim dial it must be a collective dance. What makes die moment memorable-a writer's cognitive ploy-is Capek's confidence in his readers's certainty that amphibians simply do no such thing. Human beings may convene to twirl or undulate in rhythmic communion, from great throngs in stadiums executing sophomoric semaphore to the temporally disciplined couplings joust and pas de deux. (The benchmark study here is William McNeill's Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History [Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1995]; but on the geometry employed in pursuit of virtues both bellicose and pacific [p. 67] see now Kate van Orden's Music, Discipline and Arms in Early Modern France [Chicago: University Chicago Press, 2005]) Synchronized sensorimotor alignment, requiring cognitive feats somaesthetic and kinaesthetic processing as well as anticipatory precision, occurs rarely in the vertebrate clades. Nothing resembling it exists among nonhuman primates in the wild (except possibly the coordinated chorusing and duetting several species gibbon-an exception, if allowed, the rule-proving variety). Here the parallel with human language seems unavoidable, and so it is that much the literature on the evolutionary origins music-making flows from investigations into the neurobiology communication (see, e.g., Marc Hauser et al., The Faculty Language: What is it, Who has it, and How did it Evolve?, Science 298, no. 5598 [22 November 2002]: 1569-79). Nor is there evidence for interactive synchronizing nervous systems in the palaeontological record early hominids, including the phylogenetic branch ending in Homo neanderthalensis, the focus Steven Mithen's new contribution to the nascent field cognitive archaeology. In Singing Neanderthals, Mithen undertakes to survey recent developments in evolutionary psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience, in an elaborate exposition Charles Darwin's hypothesis that human musical behaviors-from liturgical choreography to the impassioned intonations oratory-derive from a protolinguistic phase hominid prehistory (TAi Descent Man [London: Murray, 1871], 880). Following Darwin and many successors besides, an account the vocal and neural substrates for language necessarily plays a framing role. Mithen not only marshals evidence for music's origins in a kind affective, nonreferential protolanguage, he also proposes a matrix conditions for the subsequent (i.e., post-Neanderthal) emergence the language capacity itself. But it is fair to say that a clear grasp the relationship between the language and music functions remains elusive and controversial, and caution is called for. One the chief difficulties has to do with the modularity mental functions. Like consciousness itself, language and music do not seem confined to specific modularities within the brain, but rather involve integration across multiple subsystems through the establishment neural networks. …